New lease on life: 3GPP2 publishes CDMA2000 1X Advanced spec

All the next-gen focus seems to be on HSPA+, WiMAX, and LTE these days, but make no mistake, CDMA's alive and well -- and even for the world's present-day CDMA carriers planning to migrate to LTE, legacy cells will be critical assets for years (if not decades) to come. To that end, the CDMA Development Group has announced that the 3GPP2 has published official specifications for CDMA2000 1X Advanced, which bundles a whole bunch of tweaks and enhancements geared toward significantly increasing voice capacity on 1X airwaves (up to four times current capacity, theoretically). This'll give LTE carriers a technology path that should easily carry CDMA through the end of its life without oversaturation, and as an added bonus, it frees up space for more EV-DO spectrum.

Perhaps more interestingly, the CDG is talking up simultaneous 1X Voice and EV-DO data -- SVDO -- which should finally close a big gap that EV-DO suffers against its UMTS / HSPA counterparts and deliver on a promise originally intended to be delivered by Qualcomm's EV-DV tech back in the day. 1X Advanced upgrades are expected to be available to carriers in the second half of 2010, and SVDO is anticipated to hit around the same time.